Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Hammering the wrong nails

Jim Hoagland:

Richard A. Posner does not simply point to feet of clay. He attacks them with hammer, tongs and clarity of insight when it comes to the dangers of the ragged overhaul of U.S. intelligence that Congress and the Bush administration now pursue.

By Posner's lights, the Sept. 11 commission, with the help of indolent and uncritical media, stampeded panicky politicians into "a premature, ill-considered commitment" to an intelligence reform that will do little to improve this nation's security against surprise attack.

By declaring relatives of the Sept. 11 terrorists' victims its "partners" and giving them a platform, the commission "lent a further unserious note to the project. . . . One can feel for the families' loss and understand their indignation . . . without thinking that the status of being a victim's relative is a qualification for opining on how the victim's death might have been prevented."

And he points to this fundamental flaw in the way the commission was organized: "To combine an investigation of the attacks (the causes, the missed opportunities, and the responses) with recommendations for preventing future attacks is the same mistake as combining intelligence and policy. The means believed available for solving a problem influence how the problem is understood and described."

This is the policymaker's equivalent of every problem looking like a nail if you have only a hammer: If bureaucratic reorganization is the only obvious answer, bureaucratic failure had to be the problem from the outset. Ergo, blame the spies for intelligence failure and centralize: Create a director of national intelligence (DNI) and draw a new organization chart for the nation's overlapping but uncommunicative spy agencies.

...

The careerist imperative in Washington "is based on the known reluctance of civil servants, even those not involved with classified materials, to share information with their superiors," the judge writes. Instead, the bureaucracy strives to maintain "the knowledge deficit" that a political appointee brings to a new post. A knowledgeable policymaker quickly becomes his or her own intelligence agent, developing outside sources and discounting what subordinates provide.

It is good to see someone take a critical look at this issue. Rearranging the deck chairs does not solve the problem. Penetration of our enemy's plans still appears to be beyond our reach. Decoding scraps of information may be enhanced by further centralization, but it also could just be creating a bigger pool for the scrapes to get lost in.